Adobe Posts Illustrator CS Tryout

Late yesterday, Adobe posted a tryout version of Illustrator CS, a time-limited version of the company's vector illustration program. It's available now for Mac OS X and Windows.

Illustrator CS offers several major enhancements over its predecessor, including a 3D extrusion feature. This allows users to extrude 2D objects into 3D space and manipulate their X, Y and Z rotation; apply lighting; map artwork onto individual surfaces; and perform a number of other operations. Extruded objects remain live and editable.

It also offers new typography features, including wide support for OpenType (with context-sensitive features for alternate glyphs, ligatures, etc.); paragraph and character styles; the ability to define and edit multiple rows and columns of text; Optical Kerning and Optical Margin Alignment options for enhanced layouts; customized tab leaders, including dashes, dots and artwork; and the adoption of the Adobe Every-Line Composer for optimizing word spacing and hyphenation. Other new features in Illustrator CS include: